How to Contact a Production Company

Reader Don writes (boy, I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails this week):

How would I go about finding contact info for movies in pre-production, specifically Marvel’s “Captain America”? I’d love to work on the film in some capacity…

There are a number of ways you could go about finding the company.  Variety and the Hollywood Reporter have production listings weekly. HR puts them out on Thursdays, but I can’t remember when Variety does, which is okay, because Variety’s tend to be less complete, anyway.

There’s also a rumor sheet called The Production Weekly, which gathers all kinds of unreliable info and releases it, as you might imagine, weekly. Be careful, though, because they release information months before it’s actually useful to people like us.  On more than one occasion, I’ve called companies from that list and got shouted at in reply: “No, we’re not in production yet!”

In the case of Captain America, I happen to know that the production company is Marvel Entertainment. You can find their number just be grabbing a Hollywood Creative Directory. The Los Angeles library has fairly recent ones. You might even be able to just call the reference desk at the central library and ask them to look it up. You can also find the HCD online, but it costs money.

Another important thing is to find out who’s actually in charge of that particular production. The best way to do this is to go to Variety.com (HR’s website costs money) and just search for a film. Read any articles that come up, and look for a comment along the lines of “Mr. X is overseeing the film” or “Ms. Y is shepherding the project.”  That person (or, rather, that person’s assistant) can put you on the right track for talking to the production office.

Hope this helps!